Now Hiring Smiling Faces

Book excerpt: In this dueling two novel sensation a low-end sci-fi tale about navigating the future work place and debtor?s prison, follows the lead of a present day office horror story. A depressed ad writer for a weekly paper in Los Angeles watches his hopes for a meager life erode away under the bristling greed of incompetent and clueless management. As a catharsis, he writes a novel that follows his own life very closely, but is set four years in the future where everyone works for commission only. Anyone in debt, caught with intoxicants, or who becomes sick falls into the black hole of work camps for the poor, or hospital prisons where self-surgery is the only help available. The camps are massive subsidiaries of the major fast food industries, and prisoners spend their days working giant hog nut grinding machines and curly fries mixers at a pay rate that is guaranteed to keep them inside for years. The one way out of these massive fast food factories? Distinguish yourself as a soldier in the combat of the culture wars. And our hero, Ralph Pearcy, attempts to do just that. The last word in modern office novels, the prescient gallows humor of this one will have you choking before sending you home with your ass kicked.